I uploaded 50 worldbuilding infographics to NotebookLM, Google's LLM-driven notebook tool, last week and gave it a job to do:
- Resolve contradictions between sources
- Elevate meaningful differences
- Create a summary
- Incorporate a deep research run from Perplexity, seeded from that summary
- Generate a mind map and a report from the whole thing
Now I have a queryable worldbuilding resource. One that I made in an afternoon instead of never.
That last part is the thing. I wasn't going to do this. The gains felt distant and hypothetical. Organizing 50 infographics into something coherent and cross-referenced is exactly the kind of tedious busywork that sits on a to-do list for months before quietly disappearing. But I could just tell a robot what I needed, specify the purpose, and it would output something shaped to serve that purpose.
So I did it. And now I can see what's what.
LLMs aren't quite the Enterprise computer — you still have to give them the right interface and the right system guidance — but with that scaffolding in place, a surprising amount of the practical value is there.
This is the thing I dreamed computers could do when I was a kid flipping through Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, poking around on the early internet, then the early web. Not just store and retrieve, but process — take your mess and give it back to you organized around your actual needs.
It's here. Not perfectly, not without friction, but here.
Some of the people behind it are weird little freaks. Some want to do bad with it. Same as it ever was with any powerful technology.
The weird little freaks in this case are often subsets of what gets called the TESCREAL crowd. It's worth looking up that acronym and unwrapping it if you haven't, because it'll save you a lot of confusion. When, say, the Anthropic founder risks his whole company to push back against the current government, or the OpenAI founder draws similar lines but cares more about the legal framing, the difference isn't random. They're operating from different ideological commitments that are easy to conflate from the outside.
It's like the difference between liberal and neoliberal, Libertarian and libertarian, Republican and Conservative and conservative. The distinctions feel pedantic until suddenly they're not — and knowing them lets you target your commentary and criticism with a lot more precision.
Anyway. I have a worldbuilding resource now. Technology enabled better writing.